xxvi INTRODUCTION

got here.* There came much painful news from home,¹ and then such a determined course of bad weather, and every other kind of annoyance, that I never was in a temper fit to write to any one; the worst of it was that I lost all feeling of Venice, and this was the reason both of my not writing to you and of my thinking of you so often. For whenever I found myself getting utterly hard and indifferent, I used to read over a little bit of the “Venice” in the Italy, and it put me always into the right tone of thought again, and for this I cannot be enough grateful to you. For though I believe that in the summer, when Venice is indeed lovely, when pomegranate blossoms hang over every garden wall, and green sunlight shoots through every wave, custom will not destroy, or even weaken, the impression conveyed at first; it is far otherwise in the length and bitterness of the Venetian winters. Fighting with frosty winds at every turn of the canals takes away all the old feelings of peace and stillness; the protracted cold makes the dash of the water on the walls a sound of simple discomfort, and some wild and dark day in February one starts to find oneself actually balancing in one’s mind the relative advantages of land and water carriage, comparing the Canal with Piccadilly, and even hesitating whether for the rest of one’s life one would rather have a gondola within call or a hansom. When I used to get into this humour I always had recourse to those lines of yours:-

‘The Sea is in the broad, the narrow streets,

Ebbing and flowing, etc.;’

and they did me good service for many a day; but at last a time came when the sea was not in the narrow streets, and was always ebbing and not flowing; and one day, when I found just a foot and a half of muddy water left under the Bridge of Sighs, and ran aground in the Grand Canal as I was going home, I was obliged to give the canals up. I have never recovered the feeling of them.

“But St. Mark’s Place and St. Mark’s have held their own, and this is much to say, for both are grievously destroyed by inconsistent

* September, 1851.

¹ This refers to the death of a friend, thus mentioned in a letter from Ruskin to his father:-

“December 7.-I have just got your letter with the announcement of our poor friend’s death. Looking back on my London life-of, I suppose, some eighteen or twenty months altogether-I recollect only ten or twelve pleasant evenings spent in society, and those were with Mr. George, Burlington Street. It is the only street in London with which I had happy associations-now all are cut off.”

This news was presently followed by that of the death of Turner (see Vol. X. p. 38).

[Version 0.04: March 2008]